What is the distribution of the LUNA’s supply?

LUNA’s supply started around 1 Billion but has been constantly reducing since then as part of the LUNA burn/UST mint mechanism. With so many tokens around, it’s always interesting to analyze how many people own these tokens.

• Is it in the hand of a few whales?
• Or, are these tokens widely distributed?

To answer this question, I looked at Flipside Crypto’s data and came up with the following analysis.

Analysis Method

1. First, I looked at all of the wallets (Terra-owned, Exchange, Smart Contracts, Validators etc.) and looked at the Total Supply, Top 100 wallets by LUNA balance, Top 1%, 5% and 10% by LUNA balance.
2. Then I removed all of the wallets that belonged to Terra, Exchange, Smart Contracts and computed the numbers for Total Supply, Top 100 wallets by LUNA balance, Top 1%, 5% and 10% by LUNA balance.
3. To see how these ratios changed over time, I computed them on the last-day of the month from the earliest date in Flipside tables which was around March 2020.
4. Interactive charts can be found here — https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/139-terra-luna-distribution-RXMnKN

Insights

All Wallets

First, let’s look at all wallets.

Here we see all the metrics pretty close until October 2020. That’s when the difference between the Top 100 and the rest of the metrics starts to emerge. The difference continues to get wider and wider and by October 2021, there is a 40 Million LUNA difference between the top 100 and the top 1 % wallets by LUNA balance. So, what happened in October 2020?

If we compare the supply distribution charts above to the number of wallets that make up the Top 1%, 5% and 10% — we see a massive spike in October 2020. It seems that many smaller LUNA holders onboarded to Terra and that’s why we see daylight between the Top 100 and Total Supply lines above. Here are three events from Terra’s October 2020 Community Update that might have led to the the increase in the overall number of wallets:

• Columbus-4 launched
• $LUNA Staking on Upbit

But event that most likely led to the increase is the Coinmarketcap Earn campaign — https://coinmarketcap.com/earn/project/terra

Filtered Wallets

Now, let’s remove all the Terra-owned, Exchange, Smart Contracts, Validators etc. wallets and focus on what are likely to be real users. Here’s what we observe from these wallets:

1. Immediately we see the maximum LUNA supply in these wallets has fallen from 1 Billion at peak to around 200 Million.
2. We still see a similar 40 Million LUNA difference between the Total Supply here and the Top 100. It is likely these are the same smaller investors that joined in October 2020 that make up for that difference.

When we look at the filtered wallets, we don’t see a massive difference in the number of wallets that make up 1%, 5% and 10% of the wallets by LUNA balance. It is likely because the number of wallets we excluded make up for a small number but from the difference in LUNA we can see that nearly 800 Million LUNA is locked in those wallets/addresses.

So, what did we learn?

We learnt that almost 98-99% of LUNA is concentrated in top 1% of the wallets whichever way you look at it (All wallets or filtered wallets).

How does this compare to the wealth distribution of a developed nation? Let’s use USA as an example. From this Statista chart, we see that top 1% only own about 30% wealth.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299460/distribution-of-wealth-in-the-united-states/

So, LUNA still has some ways to go as far as wealth distribution goes.